“I don’t think you’re an idiot. We just have different interests. I didn’t think you knew Gourmont.”
“I don’t. School French, weekends in Paris and educated guesses. How did I do?”
“Not bad,” I said. “There’s a better translation, better than I can manage. Hang on. I’ll find it.”
I located the edition I wanted and ran a finger down the index until I hit the entry for Remy de Gourmont’s short story, “Danaette”.
“Here.” I read from the translation. “The boundless, fabulous mountains where the precious little adulteresses, loved without end, drift upon their unrelenting swoons, beneath the imperious caresses of all the perverse angels.”
“And? Why that passage?”
“Why choose it? I’m not sure. I’ve always liked it. Something about the sense of distance. Something about the juxtaposition of perversity and the angelic, about the inability to distinguish the two, somehow.”
Something about adultery.
“Lovely,” said Emily. “Well, throw it in the case if you want it. Let’s get going. It’s at least another couple of hours to Whitstable. We can eat on the way.”
I placed the two books in the suitcase, then carried it, still open, into the other room and put it on the table. I took one last look around the room as I filled the case with the art books I had already chosen. Behind the couch, in the small space between its arching back and the wall, I saw a pillow, sheets and a duvet. The bedroom could accommodate two, and not always the same two, but not one, apparently. I headed downstairs, where Emily was waiting impatiently.
“It’s another couple of hours, Anna. Let’s go.”
“You slept on the couch?” I asked.
“Let’s go, Anna.”
That was the only answer she felt I deserved.
Turner painted Whitstable, too. He was commissioned to create an original work to become one of the engravings in Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England. His subtle use of watercolours, the translucency of his sea, the small figures working along the muddied shoreline, the stumps of long-decayed groynes which lead the eye to a white horse trying, with help from its drivers, to pull a loaded cart along the final few yards to a solid track: all these combine to give a clear sense of the oyster beds in the foreground and the pretty seaside town in the distance, across the bay. Just to be on the safe side, however, Turner included a small, fallen sign in the lower-right corner which reads, “Whitstable Oyster Beds. Notice.” In contrast, our road map was an unpoetic sheet of primary colours: pop art for cartographers.
Emily broached the subject of how we might handle Gerald once we arrived, opening with, “I don’t know if you remember what happened at the auction house…” and building a predictable argument which centred around my allowing her to control the situation. I nodded in agreement. It seemed—as it so often seemed—the easiest response, and the one least likely to jeopardize my search for information. Besides, I knew I could behave as I pleased at Mr Carter’s house: it would be too late for Emily to do anything then. She asked me where I had put the painting.
“I left it in my room,” I replied, looking out at the fields, ploughed and walled by the rivulets of rain on the window.
“Why the hell did you do that?”
Two answers, public and private.
“Look at the weather, Ems. I was worried it would get damaged. It’s still out of its frame. And it’s not ours, remember?” And what if Gerald wants it back and can afford it? He might contact the new owner because he has our number because you gave it to him, you told me, so he can find out where we are and who owns the cottage. Then it will be gone, they will be gone, and I shall not be able to find out any more about them because their leaving will be a passing marked by death certificates and no more. I shall be Jo Hopper, alone with my window.
“Well, all right,” said Emily. “I just hope you can describe it well enough.”
“I can,” I said, and directed my attention to the map. “We’ll need to turn off to the left at some point. If we reach the blue we’ve gone too far.”
Turner did not paint anything resembling Mr Carter’s small, semi-detached bungalow. It faced a suburban road, looking across red pavers and concrete to other, equally unexceptional bungalows. Some of them had maritime-themed names: “The Sands”, “Tide Cottage”. “Oyster Shell House” had a low garden wall encrusted with oyster shells embedded in some chalky-looking cement mixture. The whole estate was already dated in excess of its age: a paradigm of seventies aspirational utilitarianism.
We had arrived at number 16—no name—to the twitching of a lace curtain. A man I took to be Mr Carter was standing by the open door before we had a chance to ring the bell. He seemed the perfect resident of his home: a short, elderly man, dressed smartly in an overarching theme of beige and brown. His hair was close-cropped on the sides of a balding head, and a wide but sparse moustache adorned his upper lip. He wore a cravat of emerald green and crimson, echoing the green-glazed pots which dressed the path beneath his front windows. He spoke without waiting for us to introduce ourselves:
“Hello, hello. I’m Gerald. You must be Emily and Anna. Now which is which? No. Let me guess.”
He pointed at Emily.
“Anna. Am I right?”
Emily pursed her lips and shook her head, slowly, as though she were ashamed to have to prove him wrong, as though she were considering if she ought to lie and be Anna for the rest of the afternoon.
“Ah, well,” Mr Carter continued, “never mind. Hello Emily! And you must be Anna. Hello.”
He shook our hands and ushered us in. It was not until we reached the lounge that we finally had a chance to speak. I led the way, behaving as I pleased.
“Hello Mr Carter,” I said. “We’ve come about the painting.”
I spoke carefully and deliberately, not as I might if talking to an elderly relative, but as if I were drunk, and aware of being drunk, and finding it important not to seem drunk in company. Emily looked at me as if I were drunk.
“Yes, yes. The painting. Well, there’s time for that. Tea?” said Mr Carter, gesturing towards a coffee table already decorated with china cups and saucers and a teapot under an orange, knitted tea-cosy.
I took the biscuit tin from Emily and handed it to him.
“We made you a cake,” I said.
“Marvellous. Marvellous,” said Mr Carter, appearing genuinely thrilled. “Take a seat. I’ll go and get some plates. You’re probably hungry.”
We were hungry. Despite our plans, we had not stopped for food: neither of us could face sitting together, alone, making small-talk over another sullen, Formica table-top. Mr Carter disappeared into the hallway, leaving us side by side on the couch. The clink of china and cutlery drifted out from the kitchen. Emily whispered to me:
“I thought we agreed that I’d do the talking.”
“I just said ‘hello’ and offered him the cake,” I whispered back.
Mr Carter reappeared to ease the ensuing tension and to complete the still-life on the table with the cake, and a cake-slice, and side-plates, and cake-forks. Then, for a few minutes, everything was how-many-sugars, milk-or-lemon, napkins, small-slice-large-slice. When all was settled it was Emily who brought us back to her plan.
“We found a painting, Mr Carter. It used to belong to you,” she said.
“Call me Gerald. Yes, you mentioned it on the telephone. I gave a lot of things to auction. I moved to this place and it was smaller, you see? I was in insurance. Retired. I couldn’t keep everything.”
“Well, the painting is very important,” I said.
Gerald looked over at me.
“Oh?” he said.
Emily placed a hand on my knee.
“What Anna means,” she said, “is that it’s interesting. She works at a gallery and this sort of thing fascinates her.”
“Ah,” said Mr Carter. “Well, yes, I can imagine. May I see it?”
Emily looked at me.
&nb
sp; “We didn’t bring it, Mr Carter,” I said. “Emily wanted to, but I was worried it would get damaged. The weather has been vile.”
Emily took her hand from my knee. I pressed on.
“But it was the one with stone walls and the two people on the bed, with the curtains. A bit like the red in your cravat. One of them is resting her head on the chest of the other, looking out at you.” And they want me to know who they are, and why they are there, and you might be the only one who can tell me that, and did you know Simeon Solomon was arrested for sodomy? Not that it matters, really, unless you think it does, of course.
“Do call me Gerald, please,” said Mr Carter. “I know the one you mean. Nice thing, but nowhere to put it now.”
He waved his hand around in a little circle whilst looking up at the ceiling, seeking to affirm the dimensions of his lounge.
“I can’t tell you much, I’m afraid.”
Emily took up the thread.
“Do you know how you got it? Could we trace it back that way?” she asked.
“Oh, heavens, no. It’s a family piece. I inherited it when my father died. It was painted by my great-grandmother’s brother. But no room.”
Emily and I looked at each other. She must have been able to see that I was more relaxed and that I was not intoxicated and that I was no longer even trying not to appear intoxicated. She let me speak.
“Oh, I see. Can you tell us anything about him?” I asked.
“More tea?”
Mr Carter reached for the pot.
“No, no,” I said, but Emily must have sensed that I was being rude, in some way which was unclear to me.
“Yes, that would be lovely,” she said. “And some more cake, too, if that’s all right. We’re famished.”
Mr Carter spoke softly but clearly as he poured tea and splashed milk, sliced and served cake. He seemed to be reciting something practised, as though he had engineered our meeting to give him a platform for a well-rehearsed oration.
“My great-grandmother’s brother, Matthew Taylor, was a Pre-Raphaelite manqué. He lived in Oxford for most of his life, with his wife, Constance. From what I understand she came to the marriage with money, so his failure didn’t stop them from remaining reasonably well-off. He made some bad decisions, kept up with the wrong painters, missed the boat, as it were. Constance died before my father was born, but he kept going until I was two or three. My father said he seemed a decent chap, but then he didn’t know him well. He’d given up painting by then.”
He sat back with his cup balanced on a saucer in his left hand, stirring his tea with a little silver spoon, slowly and deliberately.
“What else would you like to know? I don’t think there’s anything more I can tell you.”
“Do you know when it was painted?” I asked. “Or the subject? Or the people who sat for it?”
Emily thinned her lips into her best calm-down expression and took control from me.
“Really, any clues would be most appreciated,” she said, with an elocution she normally reserved for clients and courtrooms.
Mr Carter took a sip from his tea and leaned forward, placing his cup and saucer back on the table, theatrically. He stood up.
“Follow me,” he said.
Emily and I followed him, curious but wary, into a spare bedroom at the rear of the house. The room was spotlessly clean, and the bed meticulously made up for any visitor who might need to spend a night. The air of expectant readiness was broken, however, by a trapdoor which hung open from the ceiling, and by the ladder which ran down from the attic above. On the bed were three cardboard boxes of the type used for storing office files in bureaucratic archives. On each was scrawled “Papers” in thick, black marker pen. Mr Carter waved a hand towards them and beamed at us.
“I think you’ll find these interesting, Anna,” he said, and opened the first box.
I peered over his shoulder at the contents. It seemed to be a mixture of notebooks and papers, some printed, some covered with neat, copperplate writing.
“What is it?” I asked.
Mr Carter replaced the lid.
“They’re from around the time that the painting was done. I had a bit of a rifle through, but I thought I’d leave the detective work to you.”
I turned to Emily. She was checking the time on her watch.
“It’s getting a little late, Anna. It’s a long journey home. I don’t think we have time to look at these now. Do you think we could borrow them, take them with us, Gerald?”
Mr Carter looked perturbed, and then crestfallen.
“Well,” he said, “I’m not sure. They’re from the family, you see. And…”
He looked at me, perhaps expecting that I would side with him and insist that we stay longer. It was true that I was keen to look through the boxes. They were full of treasure, surely. I had moved Turner’s fallen sign—“Whitstable Oyster Beds. Notice.”—and found beneath a chest full of gems, and gold and silver coins stamped with boats and the heads of kings and coats of arms. But if I looked at the hoard I would have to leave it behind and I wanted it with me, wanted to reunite it with the painting back at the cottage. I knew what Mr Carter needed to hear.
“The thing is, Gerald,” I said, “if we borrow these I’ll be terribly careful with them. I work with precious objects for a living. You can trust me. And of course we’d come back again, to return them and talk about our findings. You have our number. You can always call if you’d like them back sooner, or just want to know how I’m getting on.”
I smiled as though everything were fine even though I was still in the deadened space of Monet’s Venice, dark as the hole in the ceiling above me, in the spare room where Gauguin would never sleep, irrespective of Gerald’s longing for company.
“Well,” I said, not waiting for a reply, “we can load up the car after another slice of cake, right Ems? There’s always time for another slice of cake.” And purples and yellows.
“Of course,” said Emily, poor Emily, for whom Turner’s hoard was just more sand and oyster shells.
Mr Carter, holding his cup and saucer, occasionally lifting the cup to his mouth and sipping the lukewarm liquid within, watched from the front window of his tea-and-cake bungalow which Turner never painted. Emily had been right, it was getting late, but nevertheless I asked if we might drive to the sea, which was two minutes away, before we turned to the long westward journey. Everything was grey and empty. No little figures picked oysters. There was no struggling, white horse on the sands. The air smelled of seaweed and vinegar. A few seagulls circled overhead, or hopped around near the car, pecking at food wrappers blown to them by the wind.
“Can we go home now?” asked Emily.
I nodded and shut my eyes as she started the engine. When I opened them again the road signs were counting down the final miles to London.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. It’s good for you. It’s going to be two, maybe three hours until we get back. You should sleep.”
“I can keep you company, if you like. Read the map. We can talk.”
“It’s all right. I need to concentrate on driving anyway.”
The world outside was all grass banking and small shrubs, ebbing and flowing in the sodium yellow of the lights, inconstant.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
Emily kept her eyes on the road.
“Of course. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. Not after everything. Why did you say that?”
“Because you didn’t say it. After everything, you didn’t.”
“It’s hard for me, too, Anna. I know it should be, and I shouldn’t complain, and I don’t, really, do I? But it is. I love you. Okay?”
“Can we listen to the radio?”
Emily turned the radio on and adjusted the volume. Whether or not it was her intention she set it to just the right level to fill an emptiness which might have demanded conversation. A sip of water. Two purples. The radio was not loud enough to keep me awake. The
lights continued to wax and wane, little yellow moons rushing up the windscreen and eclipsing out of sight, and then they were just red-yellow fields, pulsing on my closed lids, until I travelled so far away that they, too, were swallowed by darkness.
The slam of Emily’s door woke me. She was already halfway along the cottage path, head down to protect her face from the rain, shining a pocket-torch to guide her through the skeletal rose bushes which pressed in from either side. I undid my seat belt and waited for her to turn on the light above the front door. She headed back towards me with the torch as I got out of the passenger seat.
“It’s horrid out. Come inside. We’ll get the boxes in the morning,” she said.
“No. I promised Gerald they’d be safe.”
I opened the rear door and slipped the first of the boxes from the seat belt which held it in place.
“All right. Give it to me,” said Emily. “You get the next one and follow.”
I got the next one and followed. Emily passed me as she made another trip to the car.
“I’ll get the last one and lock up. You put the kettle on.”
As I got closer to the front door she turned and half-spoke to, half-shouted at me.
“Don’t open the boxes. It can wait. Make tea. Toast if you want. The boxes wait.”
That was the thing about treasure: it had waited so long to be found that it could wait a little longer, and it would be fine because it was safe inside the cottage, back where it belonged, with the painting. Outside, the rain could tumble, and the night could set in, and the roses could reach out, but the papers were safe. I put the kettle on and sat down. Emily did everything else when she returned with the final box. The painting lay on the table, and we drank and ate and warmed ourselves by the radiator. It seemed safe, the whitewashed room with the walls collapsing, and the yellow after purple, and time for bed, and I told her I loved her, too, or I think I told her, in the ebb and flow.
CHAPTER TEN
Wednesday, 9th November, 1887
All the Perverse Angels Page 11